Curated by Jenny He, Ron Magliozzi, and Rajendra Roy

The Museum of Modern Art’s Tim Burton retrospective includes screenings of his entire corpus of film features, from Peewee’s Big Adventure (1985) to Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), as well the early shorts Vincent (1982)—a black-and-white stop-motion film about a young boy obsessed, like Burton, with Vincent Price, who provides the narration—and Frankenweenie (1984), starring Shelley Duvall. These shorts presage Burton’s preoccupation with the bizarre and the “gothic,” as well as his predilection for oddball stars, not to mention his flair for mordant comedy. The exhibition also assembles more than seven hundred drawings, paintings, storyboards, maquettes, puppets, production ephemera, etc. Some of the director’s favorite films, from F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu to Mark Robson’s Earthquake, will be showcased in an accompanying series, appropriately titled “The Lurid Beauty of Monsters.”

— David Rimanelli